


Hometown Glory

by justanothersong



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 9/11, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, F/M, Military, New York City, Not A Happy Ending, hidden romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 03:17:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13895097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/pseuds/justanothersong
Summary: You had only a few minutes before he had to go and when you both arrived downstairs to greet the rest of the family you were flushed and tearful, which set your mother off, and then everyone was crying and hugging and they were getting into the car and they were leaving.He promised to call you. To write. To email. And he kept those promises.





	Hometown Glory

There’s a reason so many people write songs about New York. It doesn’t take more than a day spent in the teeming metropolis to know there is something special there. It’s not just the skyscrapers, the flashy restaurants, the history; there’s something more. Something innate to the place, to the people, that make it something to be seen. People could call it whatever they want: the Big Apple, the City that Never Sleeps… to you, there would only ever be one name that did it justice. _Home_.

But sometimes home was more than just a city. Sometimes it was a neighborhood. An apartment block. A humid summer night staring at the stars, laying on an old blanket thrown out on a tiny fire escape. Sometimes it was the taste of a cold cherry soda from the corner bodega, a laughing run through an open fire hydrant. 

Sometimes home was the bluest pair of eyes you’d ever seen, framed with thick lashes, brightening with a slow, bashful smile. 

Sometimes home was _all_ of these things, never feeling just right until you were there.

 

You’d been lucky, you knew. Your family never had a lot of money but what you did have was love, and lots of it. It filled the small apartment you grew up in to the rafters, bursting forth from the hearts of your parents, your brother, your sisters, and then the skinny teenager that your parents took in when he lost his mother. Steve had been your brother’s best friend for as long as either could remember, and you couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t been part of your life. To Bucky, you knew Steve was the brother that he’d never had, but to you, Steve had always been something… different.

You remembered watching with wide eyes, peeking from through a cracked bedroom door as they played on a second-hand Nintendo in the living room. Even before Steve’s mother passed and your parents asked him to move in, he was more or less a permanent fixture in your home. Your bedroom walls were full of pinned-up sketches of your favorite cartoon characters, and when you home tearful after a schoolyard fight with split knuckles and a bloody nose, Steve had been the one to patch you up.

You still had a scar on your hand from Bianca Rumlow’s front tooth, so many years later; she made it her mission to pick on everything from your family car to your hand-me-down jeans after Bucky beat her older brother in a youth boxing tournament.

She took it one step too far when she called Bucky a cheat. You would have thought even a ten year old would have enough logic in her head to realize that a youth boxing champ would have taught his sisters how to fight. 

You’d run home when it was over, fearful there would still be a teacher or a playground monitor around after the final bell rang to get you into trouble, and feeling wretched that you gotten blood all over your clothes and they might have to be thrown away. There was no money for new school clothes that year, and you hadn’t cared that you were wearing Becca’s castoffs.

Steve had given you a sympathetic smile when you returned home, leading you to the bathroom where he sat you on the closed toilet and cleaned and bandaged your hands, wiping the blood from your face with a warm wet washrag.

“Don’t worry,” he told you with a small smile. “We’ll get you cleaned up, then you go put on your PJ’s and we’ll get all the blood outta these clothes before your Mom and Dad get home, ok?”

Years later, you realized that some small part of you had started falling in love with him that day.

It simmered quietly inside of you for years, growing in strength as the time passed. You both grew up; everyone did, Annie going off to follow her dreams in California and Becca getting ready to start her senior year of high school, and Steve and Bucky loading up their meager belongings into a rusty old Chevy, ready to head off to college.

You were sixteen then, and your heart was breaking. It was hard enough when Annie left the family home -- beautiful, glamorous Annie, your big sister, who had taught you and Becca how to do makeup and fix your hair, who dreamed of a life full of sunshine and ocean waves. It left an empty place in your home -- in your _family_ \-- and it had been so hard to see her empty chair at the breakfast table each day but now, losing Bucky and Steve all at once, it was even worse.

They wouldn’t really be gone, your mother insisted. They were only a few hours’ drive away in Boston, and they would come home for holidays.

But they were still leaving. Going to a place that could change them -- that _would_ change them. The Bucky and Steve who came home for Christmas wouldn’t be the Bucky and Steve who had left. They would grow. Things would be different.

Steve, sweet and wonderful Steve, who had just started to gain a few inches in height after years and years of poor health and small stature, would meet someone there, you were sure of it. Someone who would see him the way you did. 

You never really had any hope of Steve being yours, but the thought of him being someone else’s hurt more than you wanted to admit.

Bucky was laying on the horn downstairs and your mom and dad and Becca were all gathered there waiting; your father had his camera in hand, a new digital model that you, your siblings, and Steve had saved to get him that past Father’s Day. Steve had ducked back upstairs, grabbing the inhaler he had forgotten on the dresser in the bedroom he had shared with Bucky. He had found himself needing it less and less as he grew and his health began to improve, to the point that it had actually slipped his mind.

You hadn’t planned on going down to see them off and he seemed to realize that when he found you lingering in the living room.

“Hey girlie,” he said with half a smile, using a nickname born from a months long obsession with pink and glitter you had developed as a preteen. “Not even going to come say goodbye?”

You opened your mouth to respond, to say something glib or playful, shocking yourself and Steve when instead you began to cry.

“No, hey, c’mon,” Steve said quickly, face falling as he pulled you into a hug. He wasn’t as wiry as he used to be, you realized, and now he was tall enough to rest his chin atop your head. 

“Please don’t cry,” he continued. “Buck’ll be back to see you in no time.”

“It’s not…” you tried to say, but not finding the words.

He kept his arms around you but pulled away enough to see your face, reaching with one hand to wipe a tear from your cheek.

“Then what is it?” he asked quietly, and there was a stillness in the room that you felt heavily in your heart. The noise of the city, your family talking and laughing three floors below, all faded away. “C’mon, you can tell me.”

You didn’t think about it. If you had, maybe you would have stopped yourself. You surged up, standing up on your toes to reach him, and pressed a soft kiss to his lips. You both froze in shock at the action and you pulled away, stunned at what you had done. You hadn’t meant to tell him -- he wasn’t ever to have known. Now you had spoiled everything.

“Oh,” Steve said slowly, breath coming fast enough that for a moment you thought he would need the inhaler he had tucked into his pocket. “ _Oh_. Why didn’t… why didn’t you ever say…?”

And then his arms tightened around you and he was kissing you breathless, murmuring wonderful things against your lips as he held you close, wishing so badly that you had told him because he had wanted this, wanted you, for so very long, and begging you not to hate him for leaving.

You had only a few minutes before he had to go and when you both arrived downstairs to greet the rest of the family you were flushed and tearful, which set your mother off, and then everyone was crying and hugging and they were getting into the car and they were leaving.

He promised to call you. To write. To email. And he kept those promises.

 

Boston just wasn’t for you. When it was your turn to leave, you knew where you wanted to go; your best friend, Wanda, mailed her application to Tulane the same day as you did, and you received your acceptance letters on the same day too.

Steve hadn’t minded.

“We’ll see each other at the holidays,” he reminded from the payphone in his dorm. “And we can go someplace for Spring Break, together. Just you an’ me.”

You laughed, sitting on the kitchen floor in your family’s apartment, the lights off and the phone cord stretched to accommodate your position. Your parents were in the living room watching Dateline and Becca, who had decided to go to school in the city and live at home, was out with her friends.

“I think Bucky might think that was weird,” you said with a quiet giggle. It had been two years and you hadn’t told anyone, too fragile a thing at first to risk exposure and then enjoying it a little, the secrecy of it, something that only belonged to the two of you after years of growing up in hand-me-downs and shared spaces.

“Maybe it’s time we tell’im,” Steve countered. “Tell all of’em. Cos if we wait much longer, everyone is going to think it’s pretty weird when you move in with me after graduation.”

You giggled and blushed, slapping a hand over your mouth in hopes that your parents didn’t hear, at the mere thought of it. Living with Steve. Waking up beside hiIt made you grin, your cheeks burning hot.

 

You’d been lucky, all of you. You’d grown up in a city that was safe and insular, in its way. There were terrors in the world -- you knew about them, everyone did -- but they didn’t touch you at home. There were things you didn’t know firsthand, might never know, until the day you did. Until the day war came to New York.

You were still at school in Louisiana but there were no classes that day, all of them cancelled as you and your fellow students watched in abject horror on televisions that had been set up in every spare corner. You were in the student infirmary; Wanda was in a bed beside you, sleeping soundly. The campus EMTs had to sedate her and carry her from the dorms.

You’d just rolled out of bed and Wanda had turned on the television in time to see the second plane hit the Towers.

Wanda’s twin brother hadn’t come to Tulane with her, deciding like your sister that his time was better spent at home, working part time while attending classes in the evenings.

He had just started a new job in the mailroom at the North Tower. Even without hearing the news, Wanda just knew. She started screaming and couldn’t stop, didn’t stop until the EMTs pushed a needle into her arm and gave her a drug to calm her. You sat with her at the infirmary, not wanting her to be alone when she woke.

The nurses had been kind enough to let you call home. Everyone was fine, your mother had assured you through her mutual tears. Don’t come home, she had told you. Stay there, where you’re safe. Don’t think about getting on a plane, even when they start flying again. Not a train, not a bus. Stay put. Stay safe.

She confirmed what Wanda had already known, that Pietro hadn’t come home from the wreckage.

You did as your mother said.

 

Something strange happened not long after; Steve didn’t call at his appointed times and the payphone you used to call him on just rang and rang. When anyone bothered to answer, it was never anyone who knew him or Bucky. You didn’t want to alarm your family so you waited before you called home.

You finally understood when you got a postcard from Fort Dix. You knew Steve’s handwriting as well as your own by then, the simple message of ‘I’m sorry, but we have to’, because he _knew_ you’d want to stop him.

You’d called home in a panic to your mother crying; Bucky had sent her a postcard too. Your father took the phone and explained in a heavy voice that it was too late, the boys had enlisted. The specter of a soldier’s grave loomed in the distance and you were terrified.

To hell with revenge or retribution. You just wanted them home, wanted them safe.

 

You were back home, graduated with a pre-med degree with looks to continue your path at NYU when Bucky finally came home. He was a little broken, a little angry, and he had lost an arm to an anti-aircraft missile shot into the humvee caravan he had been in, but he worked hard not to show how he felt.

“Hey, you’re gonna be a doctor,” he pointed out, after giving you one of the one-armed hugs you would soon grow used to in greeting. “Tell me, how long’s it gonna be before it grows back?”

He flashed you a grin and you burst into a fit of laughter that soon faded into tears, holding tightly to your brother while your family gathered around you both, a jumble of warm embraces and tears because he was _home_ , Bucky was home, and he was hurt but he was alive.

There was still a piece missing, you thought. Annie had even come in from California, where she had modeled and then danced and then settled down, married to a schoolteacher and working in a bookstore, happy with the path life had led her down. Becca was home too; she had moved out just after you returned, having met a handsome soldier named Gabe who had returned from the war with a blown-out knee, and fallen in love. They had moved in together and you’d heard their whispers when they thought no one did, that there would be a baby soon.

But he wasn’t there. Steve was still far away, thousands of miles, oceans, a lifetime away. He sent you letters, the ink sometimes smudged with sweat, and had even managed to call once. 

“I’m coming home to you,” he told you firmly. “Just a couple more months in his hellhole and I’ll be home. I gotta tell Buck, before I get there… Gotta let him get used to the idea, sweetheart, because I want nothin’ but happiness when I get home to you.”

“Okay,” you’d agreed, trying not to cry. His voice was tinny and far away on the line, but it was still his voice, that little piece of home that was so far out of reach. “Okay, Steve. Write him, and tell him. I’ll make sure everything’s good for when you get home.”

He sent that letter, just as promised, timing it so it could arrive just a little while before he’d finish his final tour. No more extensions, no more broken promises; Steve was coming home. You’d marked the date on every calendar you could find, as if you could forget it.

You knew was it was when Bucky opened it, watching the way his eyebrows rose and his eyes grew wider, wondering what Steve had written. 

Did he tell Bucky that you’re the one who kissed him first?

Did he tell him about that Thanksgiving, when you’d lied and said you needed to stay at school and study rather than come home, then flown to Boston and spent the entire break sharing Steve’s dorm room bed? 

Did he tell him about your plans? An apartment? Getting married at a county clerk’s office, just as soon as Steve was stateside again?

Bucky had looked up at you in surprise, poised to speak, when the knock came at the apartment door and nearly ran to get, anxious for just a few more minutes before you had to have that conversation with your brother.

Looking back, you always wished you hadn’t answered the door. As if that could somehow have made it not true. As if not seeing the grim-faced soldier in his dress uniform with sad eyes could have unmade what had happened.

He asked for you by name and you had nodded mutely, gripping the door frame for fear that your legs would give out from under you. The he started to talk, the same spiel a notification officer must give dozens of times over, always new to those who have to hear it, always full of fresh heartache, and your legs did give out.

There you sat on the carpeted floor of your family’s apartment, an entryway you had passed through thousands of times, a door Steve had walked through just as many, while this stranger in an olive drab uniform explained that the love of your life was dead.

You hadn’t even known that Steve had listed you as his next of kin.

Then Bucky was there and he was touching your face but you couldn’t hear what he was saying, because someone was sobbing, long and loud and harsh, and only when you felt the hot wash of tears on your cheeks did you realize that it was you.

The soldier at the door carried you to the couch, much as you fought him. Bucky had asked him for help; he couldn’t lift you with only one arm, after all.

After some time, the soldier left, leaving some papers and a tiny cardboard box on the coffee table that jingled when it moved; you knew it would be Steve’s dog tag but you couldn’t bring yourself to look.

Bucky sat beside you, holding you as tightly as he could, until the sobs had finally subsided.

 

A year later found your life unchanged. You lived at home with your parents, with Bucky. You went to school and worked part time at a coffee shop. You smiled and laughed and did all the things expected of you, but you felt nothing. You were numb inside.

The apartment hadn’t changed much. Not that it ever really did -- the same old green couch, the same old brown carpet, the same battered kitchen table, ever since you were a little girl. But now in your mother’s china cabinet, alongside an incomplete set of crystal glasses that had been a wedding gift -- incomplete due to a rousing game of indoor softball when Bucky was twelve -- and tucked behind old school photos was a flag, all folded up into a neat triangle and placed in a glass fronted wooden case, _Captain Steven Grant Rogers, United States Army_ scrolled into a little brass placard attached to the front.

You were home, but you couldn’t be, not really. Because while sometimes a city is more than a city but sometimes a home is more than a place, more than a little apartment stuffed to the gills with family, more than a loving family.

Sometimes home is a warm washcloth soothing away a bloodied nose.

Sometimes home is the yellowed pages torn from a sketchpad, pinned to a bedroom wall.

Sometimes home was a pair of blue eyes and a bashful smile.

A frantic first kiss that doubled as a first goodbye.

The words ‘I love you’ whispered across a phone line from a thousand miles away.

Sometimes home isn’t a place at all, but even if it were, the very worst part is that sometimes, you just can’t ever go home again.

**Author's Note:**

> I am so, so sorry.


End file.
